


Either/Or

by Lokei



Series: By Virtue Fall [2]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Episode Related, Episode: Shades of Gray, Episode: The Devil You Know, First Time, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-07
Updated: 2008-09-07
Packaged: 2017-10-19 08:41:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/198997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lokei/pseuds/Lokei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daniel's acting skills have been a lot better than Jack ever suspected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Either/Or

Jack was standing alone like an idiot in the hallway.He was not a big fan of having his entire team leaving him like this.He supposed he sorta had it coming, keeping them all in the dark about the whole sting operation, but still.Not a fan.Not a fan of the eye-roll Carter had given him, not a fan of the smirk Teal’c had given him, really not a fan of that ‘drew straws’ comment Daniel had tossed off.

 _They drew straws and Daniel lost?_

Jack shook his head. What was going on?

He’d never have thought Daniel would say such a thing, even if Jack had been treating him like shit.The others hadn’t said anything, just smirked.Especially Teal’c.And if that wasn’t weirder than anything else that happened in the last two weeks, Jack didn’t know what would be.And Jack was feeling pretty weird already—he used to be okay working on his own, without involving the people under his command.Jack wasn’t that person any more, and now he had an irrepressible urge to touch base, find out what had happened here and just how much damage got done in—or by—his absence.

Though Jack wandered by the archaeologist’s office, Daniel had clearly booked.First step, then, was Teal’c.

When Jack reached his destination, Teal’c looked up at him inquiringly from his ring of candles, and then stood.It was always rather impressive the way that man seemed to loom when he wasn’t happy with you.

“It’s not like I wanted to keep this from you guys.It was orders,” Jack said. “Needed to keep you clear of it, well, to prove you were all clear of it.”

“You had doubts as to our veracity, O’Neill?”

 _Well that was grabbing the wrong end of the stick._

“Hell no,” Jack waved his arms.“Look, we’re the first contact team.We’re the best at what we do, that’s why we get that nifty little numeral in our team designation.Number one.Tops.Most likely to be in contact with any alien culture, advanced or otherwise, vulnerable or otherwise.Our recommendation on a world can seal the deal: go, stay, treaty, no treaty.We’re in a uniquely good situation to be screwing the rest of the galaxy if that’s what we decided we wanted, and because we’re the best, we’re presumed to be reasonably likely to be able to hide it if we wanted.”

Jack paused and waited for Teal’c to indicate he understood.The other nodded gravely, and Jack continued.“ I couldn’t bring you in because everyone was suspected, even me.If we worked as a team, there was a chance we could just be selling out our confederates and sticking around to set it up all over again.I had to hot dog it to prove to our ever so perspicacious allies that we were not, in fact, the rats.Never had anything to do with what I actually wanted.”

This time Teal’c unbent enough to add to his nod, “I understand, O’Neill.”He frowned.“I did not believe the Tollan would be small-minded enough to distrust those who had come to their aid in the past.”

Jack shrugged, still not over his annoyance at all the aliens in question, even the Asgard.“Yeah, well, they had reason to be concerned,” he muttered.“We good, then?”

Teal’c tipped his head to the side, which Jack took for basic assent, and turned to go.

Over his shoulder as he reached the door, he added, “Oh, and Teal’c—drawing straws?What was that about?”

Teal’c met his gaze steadily.“Do you believe Daniel Jackson to have been untruthful, O’Neill?”

It was Jack’s turn to frown.“Daniel never lies to me.Even when I want him to.”

Jack was expecting an ‘indeed.’He got the stare that he was pretty sure meant ‘the Tau’ri are dense and amusing.’

“I didn’t want Daniel to lie to me.”

“You did, O’Neill.”Jack opened his mouth to protest but Teal’c continued imperturbably.“You wished to hear that all was well between yourself and Daniel Jackson.He was unable to say so.Therefore he said something else.”

Jack frowned again.“Thanks, Teal’c.I think.”He opened the door.“I think I need to go talk to Daniel.”

“Indeed.”

= = =

Jack was finding all sorts of things not to be a fan of today.He was apparently also not a fan of knocking on Daniel’s door and then waiting.And waiting.And did he mention waiting for Daniel to open the door?

Finally, Jack found himself faced with a doorway full of Daniel, which was better than a doorway with no Daniel, but considerably more difficult to walk through.

“Hey Daniel.” He tried a small smile.

“Jack,” Daniel replied, leaning against the frame with a glass in one hand, conspicuously not inviting Jack in.

The colonel gestured at the glass in Daniel’s hand, which from the smell was probably full of that Calvados stuff Daniel loved—an expensive apple brandy from Normandy, the taste for which he’d picked up God knew where, which smelled great but had a hell of a bite to it if you were originally expecting just glorified apple juice.

“Got another one of those?”

Daniel’s lips twitched upwards slightly, but in no real amusement.“No, actually, this was the end of the bottle.”

Now that was news.Jack had gotten Daniel that bottle not that long ago, and that stuff usually would last him four or six months.“Really?”

Daniel’s eyes were as still as the rest of him.“Had a rough week or two recently,” he said flatly.

Jack made an ‘ah’ sound that felt idiotic, but which at least had the benefit of shifting Daniel from the doorway enough to let Jack inside.

They made it to the living room in awkward silence, Jack thinking furiously to come up with a way to patch up something which he had apparently seriously broken.“So…you don’t really like beer?”

The look Daniel shot him suggested this was not Jack’s most impressive conversational gambitever.“No.”

“So that makes two things.”

Daniel, who had been in the middle of lowering himself to the couch, straightened abruptly and put his glass down on the end table to cross his arms.“Two things?”

“Beer,” Jack ticked it off on his fingers, “and the drawing straws thing.”

Daniel’s face was an uncomprehending blank, but Jack persevered.

“You lied to me, Daniel!To me!I don’t know whether to hit you or be proud of you for managing it!”Jack grinned, hoping Daniel would share the joke.

“Well, that makes my choice easier,” Daniel said, and swung.Before Jack knew it, he was staggering back a good two or three paces, clutching his throbbing jaw as Daniel stood in the middle of the room, hands fisted and face furious.

“Jesus, Daniel!That hurt!”

Daniel crossed his arms again.“So did finding out my best friend considered our friendship to have ‘no foundation.’”

Jack winced.“Aw, come on, Daniel, that was a cover story.My house was bugged!”

“I figured that out, Jack!”Daniel’s eyes were blazing.There were Goa’uld system lords who hadn’t survived Daniel in this mood.Jack didn’t think his chances were much better.“I knew by the next day, after a completely damn sleepless night in which I went through pretty much every memory I had of you trying to figure out what the hell was going on.Abydos, Tonane’s people, the Touchstone—from the very beginning, it didn’t add up.I figured there was something important we weren’t being told—what I couldn’t figure out was why you didn’t let us help you.Couldn’t justify to myself why you couldn’t have written a note on a goddamn napkin that said ‘house bugged—play along.’”

Jack opened and shut his mouth a few times before he managed to come up with an answer.“Your reactions had to be real, Daniel; they had to be convincing.Doesn’t mean I wanted to do it that way, you know.You just—ah!”Jack scrubbed at his hair in frustration.“You’re so _you_ , Daniel.Everything you think and feel is right there for everyone to see as soon as you react, and you can’t fake that kind of thing.”

Much to Jack’s surprise, this seemed to make Daniel fold in on himself, and he watched in some concern as Daniel pivoted stiffly and moved to lean on the mantelpiece, head dropped between his braced hands.Daniel took a deep breath and then his shoulders started to shake.

“Daniel?”It was worry this time that sharpened his voice to a tone akin to anger, but Daniel seemed to recognize the difference as his head came up slowly and he dropped one arm to turn and look at Jack.The archaeologist’s face was contorted in a painful approximation of laughter, but there was no real mirth in the sounds escaping him quietly.

“You have no idea, Jack,” Daniel had one elbow left on the mantelpiece and it seemed to be the only thing holding him up.He closed his eyes for a moment and Jack took an involuntary few steps forward, freezing once more when Daniel’s bleak eyes pinned him again.

“I’m a damned incredible actor,” Daniel added before turning around to face the painting over the mantel again.“Should get an Oscar for it, really,” he murmured to the wall, and Jack wasn’t sure Daniel was even aware he was still speaking aloud.

Jack wandered closer, stopping within an arm’s length.Though he desperately wanted to, Jack didn’t dare touch him.

“Daniel, what are you talking about?You can tell me—I want to fix this.” Having to flat out deny Daniel for the sake of the mission had gutted Jack, even as he told himself that there was no way Daniel felt as much for Jack as Jack had been sitting on for Daniel’s sake for a long time.

“Tell me?” he repeated to Daniel’s silent back, wanting a response, an argument, something to get Daniel to turn back to him.

“Not this time, Jack.”Daniel’s voice was back to being eerily flat, his shoulder muscles tense once more.“Just let it go.You’ve said we’re solid.You can go.”

“That isn’t fixing things,” Jack denied, not sure why he couldn’t back off the way Daniel wanted, except for the glaring reason that backing away was never what he wanted, never what worked with them.They got in each other’s faces and yelled and insulted and did little hops of annoyance and got over it, got back to finishing each other’s sentences and playing each other to stalemates at chess.

“You can’t fix this.”

“Like hell I can’t,” Jack snapped.“Look me in the eye when you say that and maybe I’ll think about believing you.”

Daniel swung around, head up, eyes blazing and— _God, pooling_?Only Daniel could look so incredibly broken and so unbreakable all at the same time.The archaeologist blinked and the moisture was gone, but the glare remained.

“It’s my problem, Jack, not yours.I’ve been dealing, I will deal, just leave it.”

Jack stepped into Daniel’s space instead.“You’re my friend, Daniel.You were before all this crap with Maybourne’s goons, and you were during it, and you are now.”

Jack had never heard the sound Daniel made next come from the usually articulate archaeologist, but he could have sworn the other man _growled_ , a fierce, despairing sound that would have been a wail if it had escaped the right way, but instead was strangled to death somewhere behind Daniel’s teeth.

“I’m not your friend, Jack,” the words hissed through Daniel’s clenched jaws.

Jack snarled back, his hands automatically shooting out to grasp Daniel’s shoulders and shake him.“You are,” he insisted.

“I’m _not_ ,” Daniel repeated, reaching up with one hand and gripping Jack’s right wrist tightly.“I thought I could be, but I can’t.I’m the man who saw visions of his best friend when being pumped full of hallucinogens meant to simulate the one you trust most.I’m the man who came ungodly close to alienating every single one of our allies trying to get a ship to Edora and who could not, despite all my increasingly undiplomatic efforts.I’m the one that spent weeks trying to be you for Sam, to get her to sleep, to eat, to spend five minutes of the day not thinking about her particle generator so that she didn’t completely collapse—and I didn’t even do it for her.I did it because I couldn’t breathe for thinking I’d never get you back again and I needed Sam to be in top form because she was my only way left to get to you.”

Jack stirred slightly and Daniel’s grip on his wrist turned bone-crushing, but the archaeologist’s words flowed like a riptide, swift and inexorable.

“I’m the man who, having finally gotten back the one person who made him feel anchored, watched that person throw everything away, including everything that made him himself.I’m the man who, even after being apparently discarded like a used Kleenex, is still so damned in thrall that he wakes up in the middle of the night wishing he had the balls to tell his supposed best friend he’d like very much to take up residence in his bed and his body, if he wouldn’t mind terribly much?”

Daniel’s tone had turned cutting and he yanked down abruptly on the hand still trapped in that iron grip, bringing Jack’s suddenly nerveless fingers in contact with Daniel’s belt buckle, and then to the heat below.Jack gaped, and Daniel snorted, dropping Jack’s hand and stepping away.

Daniel walked over to the end table, picked up the glass of Calvados and took a long sip.His fingers were white on the glass, but he put it down gently enough, twisting it on its coaster until it lined up perfectly with the corner.All the fight seemed to drain out of him and he pinched the bridge of his nose, face blank, eyes avoiding Jack’s.

“I’m sorry, Jack.You’ll have my transfer request in the morning.”

Jack was sure he had once had synapses that fired, that connected to the language centers of the brain, that would make sense of everything he’d just heard and come up with the proper response.

“Daniel, I—“

 _Can’t possibly work without you on SG-1.Had no idea you felt this way.Guess I was wrong about those acting skills after all.Know you’re my friend.Love you too._

Any of those would probably have been good responses.Jack wanted to summarily execute the synapses responsible for what did come out of his mouth.Daniel looked up at him warily.

“Daniel, I—“Jack’s throat had gone dry in there somewhere and was it hot in here?“I wouldn’t mind terribly much.”

 _Great.Just peachy.Skip all those wonderful supportive things you could have said and go straight to the big thorny court-martial-worthy-yet-hideously-shallow part, why don’t you?_ Jack had plenty of time to scold himself: Daniel was frozen in his place.He’d gone entirely white and didn’t even look like he was breathing.Of course, Jack was having a few issues with that himself.

 _Dear God let the bug-sweep team have gotten them all_ , because this conversation was about to take a turn from interesting and incriminating to downright embarrassing.

“You,” Daniel’s voice was strangled sounding.“You wouldn’t mind terribly much if I transferred?”

 _Shit_!Panic broke Jack out of his paralysis and he lurched a step forward, stopping again when Daniel flinched.

“You won’t transfer, Daniel.”Jack was relieved his voice was mostly even—of course, this was the easy part to say.“Not unless you want me to come after you and drag your over-educated ass back to SG-1 where it belongs.”

Daniel’s face was gaining back a little color now, but Jack couldn’t look at him any more anyway.Embarrassing. _Yeah, that was an understatement_.

“I meant,” Jack began, stopped, swallowed, made some kind of floppy movement with his hand, and tried again.“I meant the other thing.Before.”

It was Daniel’s turn to swallow audibly.“Before.”

“Yeah,” Jack scratched the back of his neck and found something fascinating on the tip of his shoe to stare at for a while.“Because, I kinda, you know.Me too.For a while now.”

After a long pause, another pair of shoes ended up in his line of sight, and Jack looked up to find himself practically nose to nose with Daniel again.Jack wanted to snort.That was the way of it for him with Daniel.Too far away, too close, too far again, like a yo-yo.Except even too close was never close enough.

Daniel lifted his hand and it hovered over Jack’s shoulder while Daniel watched Jack’s face.Jack had no idea what he was seeing, but the hand slowly settled, warm against Jack’s neck.Daniel’s mouth twisted into that approximation of a smile he got when the irony of a situation was too much for him.

“We are very screwed up,” Daniel said softly.

Jack snorted.“You betcha.”He was planning on saying something else, but suddenly Daniel’s other hand was in his hair and the words in Jack’s mouth got all tangled up with Daniel’s tongue, because Daniel was kissing him, hard, and Jack made some kind of noise that prompted Daniel to slide his hands around to cup his face and Jack winced and jerked his head away.Daniel’s face went bleak, and then blank.

“It’s not—it’s just—Ow.”The place on his jaw where Daniel had slugged him was throbbing painfully, but the guilt in Daniel’s eyes when he figured that out hurt worse.

Daniel’s hand lifted once more, just two fingers outstretched, and brushed the bruise gently, oh so gently.“I’m sorry.”

Jack’s head was spinning.This conversation shifted gears too often, from anger to confusion to desire to god only knew where next.He hoped the Calvados was making this easier on Daniel—Jack himself could have used a beer twenty minutes ago.All he knew right now was that he hated how easily Daniel said those words, especially when he didn’t need to.

“I deserved it.” Jack flattened Daniel’s hand against his face with his own hand and pressed down deliberately.“You could have hit me harder, in fact.”

Daniel closed his eyes.“I don’t want to hit you.”There was a pause and his fingers twitched against Jack’s jaw.“Occasionally, yes, I do.But mostly—“

Jack knew.He kissed Daniel back, softly, apologizing gently with lips and fingertips and soft brushes of his palms for being an ass, for lying, for the hurts he’d caused now and before, for all the time they’d wasted being friends when they could have been friends plus this.

Daniel had been carefully holding his entire body still and away from Jack’s since Jack broke off their first kiss, but slowly Jack won him over, drew him close, and when the kiss ended, Daniel didn’t draw away.He rested his cheek against Jack’s, and Jack smiled, settling his hands lightly on Daniel’s waist, not confining, not forcing any more contact.

Naturally, that was when Daniel felt he had to start talking again.“I didn’t know,” he whispered.“I thought—I was trying to protect you.You’re military and you needed me to just be me, just friends.I couldn’t—we can’t—“

Jack pulled back far enough to look Daniel in the eye.“It’s not either/or for me, Daniel.Hasn’t been, pretty much ever.”

Daniel scrunched up his forehead.“You said—a while?”

“Abydos,” Jack confirmed.“Not that I knew it at the time.Took me a while to figure it out.The regs were an issue, for a while.And there was Sha’re.You didn’t need,” Jack frowned, trying to figure the best way to say this.“You didn’t need the complications, all that stuff I know you’re worried about with the rules and the secrecy and all.I think we can handle it, if we’re careful, if you want that.”Jack paused.“If you want me.”

Daniel blinked, his mouth open in that expression that made him look twelve.Then his mouth shut, and curved upwards.“Not either/or?”His voice wasn’t a whisper any more, more like a low hum that made Jack uncomfortable in all kinds of good ways.“Friends—and lovers?”

“Not at work,” Jack agreed.“Friends there, like always.But here, yeah,” and he finally slid his arms all the way around to hug Daniel to him.Almost close enough.Almost home.“We can be both.”

  



End file.
